Kevin Myatt

Latest entries from the Weather Journal blog

• A little holiday snow ... maybe a lot in West Virginia
• Thankful to be back on Weather Journal
• Weather Journal remains on break

About Kevin

Kevin Myatt grew up in Arkansas to the tune of tornado sirens and the rhythm of hailstones, aspiring to be a meteorologist before his studies and career were turned to journalism instead. Though he often chases storms, he prefers living in the cooler, more tranquil weather of the Blue Ridge. He moved to Roanoke in 1999 to take a job on the copy desk of The Roanoke Times; writing headlines and editing copy is his principal work for the newspaper today.

Each May, Kevin assists Pulaski County High School / Virginia Tech meteorology instructor Dave Carroll in leading college and high school students to the Plains to observe severe weather firsthand. The accounts of many of his storm chases can be found here on the storm chasing page of his weather blog on roanoke.com.

Kevin was an editor for "Hurricanes and the Middle Atlantic States," a book written by D.C.-area weather enthusiast Rick Schwartz and published by Blue Diamond Books that documents hurricanes striking the mid-Atlantic states since colonial times.

The Weather Journal column began in 2003 and appears on Friday's Virginia section front in The Roanoke Times. The Weather Journal blog began in 2006 and follows weather day-by-day between the larger columns.

No hurricane, but still a monster

The West Coast seems to have all kinds of disasters that we rarely think about in the East. Wildfires. Earthquakes. Volcanoes. Landslides.

One thing the West Coast doesn't have, though, is hurricanes.

The reason is simple. The primary ocean currents off the West Coast come from the north, bringing cold water down from Alaska. Any tropical systems that move northward from the Mexican coast lose energy as they move into colder and colder water.

Once in a great while, a tropical storm can make it close to San Diego, but none on record has made it farther north.

Contrast that to the Eastern Seaboard, where a strong current called the Gulf Stream brings a steady flow of warm water northward not far offshore. Hurricanes can hit Newfoundland, and frequently do.

But this past week, the Pacific Northwest experienced a storm that caused more destruction, death and hardship than many hurricanes have.

At least eight people have died in Washington and Oregon from the storm, with damage expected to reach the billions of dollars from flooding and high winds. Washington's governor said the tree damage was like nothing else he had seen since Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980.

The same storm brought less rain than expected to Southern California on Friday but is forecast to bring a swath of rain and snow to the nation's midsection over the weekend and early next week.

A strong northern Pacific low pressure system can be a fearsome beast.

While never as intense as the worst hurricanes, the storms can have winds equal to many weak to moderate hurricanes, and those winds can cover a much greater area.

These storms get their strength not from the latent heat in warm ocean water, as hurricanes do, but from clashing air masses and strong winds high in the atmosphere.

Late fall and early winter in the northern Pacific is a prime time to see storms like this develop, as the jet stream dips farther and farther southward after its summer retreat into the high northern latitudes.

That allows cold air from the North Pole to sink farther south and collide with warm, moist subtropical air from the central Pacific. The large area of open water keeps land features from being a factor, so the storms grow large and powerful.

The Pacific Northwest typically experiences one or two pretty large storms of this nature each year, but this last one was particularly severe, owing some of its strength to two typhoons (the East Asian word for hurricanes) whose remnants were pulled into the developing system. Thousands of people remained without power on Friday.

One thing about Pacific Northwest storms, though, is that it is rare that we catch the brunt of what remains of them as they cross the country. Usually, storms crashing into the West Coast that far north pull in mild, Pacific air across much of the nation, and the storm track is usually such that the low-pressure system passes well north of us.

That will happen again in the upcoming several days. After this week's first bouts with snow and ice, mild air will return and most of the storminess will miss us to the north and west.